For five years between 2003 and 2008 – with a brief, self-enforced break in the middle – I worked for a certain UK-based Cash & Carry company. I will not dignify them with a name. It remains one of the worst employment experiences of my life, rivalled only by the job I had making dental moulds for the NHS where I kept breaking all the teeth off.
My list of anecdotes from that time is long and unpleasant. Yes, I had the obligatory moment where I was told I was no good at the job, and sat sobbing in the manager’s office. But there were worse things afoot. How about the time a customer ordered a pallet of rice, and I witnessed them being referred to in a stupendously racist manner by someone in the order office? That seemed particularly awful – not just the racist abuse itself, but that the racist abuse was about someone who was literally giving us money and keeping us in work.
Or maybe there was the time where I passed an interview to move from the shop floor to the order office. I was given a start date, and all was well… until the job was pulled out from under me the evening before I was due to start, just because someone in management didn’t like me. Moreover, I hadn’t even been told by my manager that the move had been stopped. Someone else let me know, and I had to confront my errant manager about it myself.
Then there was the morning where I was given a sheet of instructions by that same manager, and found on the back the instructions given to him by his manager. The phrase “I am not convinced about John Hoare” is etched onto my mind to this very day. I mean, I’m not convinced about myself either, but I don’t usually have to see it written down by somebody else.
From the above, I may give the impression that I was awful at the job. This isn’t actually true. I may not have blown people away with my work, sure. But after I left, did something else for a bit, and then needed my job back, they gave it to me, and they sure didn’t do that out of the goodness of their hearts. I would suggest that the place was so badly run that doing the job well was a virtually impossible task. With years of hindsight, and experience of a half-decent work environment, I can see that now. But at the time, my self-esteem took a wholly unnecessary beating.
But with all the chaos above, there’s one incident which truly makes me realise that the place was a pathetic place to work.
I eventually did get that job in the order office. And part of that job was to talk to all the sales reps. The transaction wasn’t complicated: they tried to convince us to order more of their products, and I had to make sure we didn’t over-order and end up with stock we couldn’t sell. I remember having an argument once with the Cadbury rep about the outrageous withdrawal of Wispa from the market.
Occasionally, the reps would bring in some merchandise; I once got to try a flavour of Tic Tacs which hadn’t gone out on sale yet. This remains the highlight of my working career to date. This practice of accepting things wasn’t banned: nobody was going to order something they couldn’t sell, just because they got some free Tic Tacs. Not even me.
But one day, I had an idea. If the reps could bring in silly things like pens and the like, then maybe they could bring in something a little bigger. Like, say, a wall clock, branded with their company’s logo. Then I could put them all on the wall of the order office, and we could get an international time zones thing going. LONDON – PARIS – NEW YORK, and the like.
We could look like an important news room. In a scruffy order office somewhere in Exeter, sure. But we could have some fun. And our walls needed something interesting to put on them.
So I set to work asking the reps, and set the plan in motion. I believe we got to a grand total of two clocks on the wall before it was stopped from above. No reason given; certainly no worries about bribery, however idiotic that would have been when it came to clocks. Just a general air of “Obviously, we aren’t going to do that.”
And that’s what I remember most from working at that company. Not the sobbing in the manager’s office. Not the racism. Not the insults, given to me personally by hand. No: it was that I tried to have a little bit of fun in what could be a fairly boring job, and it was immediately stamped down on with no explanation. Because who would want to enjoy themselves at work?
Retail jobs usually suck. But the worst thing is: they don’t have to. Sometimes, fun is disallowed, because people are suspicious of it. Even something as harmless as a wall of clocks in an order office.
It crushes the soul something rotten.
* * *
In a transmission suite for a certain television channel in London, there is a poster on the wall. A poster of… a mirror globe. And if you walk just across the way to the opposite suite, there is a striking, stripy, numeral 2.
And last Christmas, a certain festive-themed Ceefax poster made its annual appearance for the third year running.
Just a tiny scrap of fun, to get you through the shift. It helps.
One comment
Fraa Ceefax on 27 May 2022 @ 8am
This post reminds me of a passage from Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. There’s too much context required to explain everything here, so I won’t bother. I think the meaning is clear enough without it.
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The way in which Yul had decided to join us on our journey north was strange to me. There had been no rational process: no marshaling of evidence, no weighing of options. But that was how Yul lived his whole life. He had not—I realized—been invited by Gnel to come out and pay us a visit at the fueling station. He had just shown up. He did a new thing with a new set of people every day of his life. And that made him just as different from the people in the traffic jam as I was.
So I looked with fascination at those people in their mobes, and tried to fathom what it would be like. Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day’s end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn’t live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul’s. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Sæculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part? We avout had it ready-made because we were a part of this project of learning new things. Even if it didn’t always move fast enough for people like Jesry, it did move. You could tell where you were and what you were doing in that story. Yul got all of this for free by living his stories from day to day, and the only drawback was that the world held his stories to be of small account. Perhaps that was why he felt such a compulsion to tell them, not just about his own exploits in the wilderness, but those of his mentors.
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